‘The Romantics Reading Milton’: a Q&A with Tess Somervell

Today we present a Q&A with Dr Tess Somervell (University of Leeds) for those that missed her fascinating talk at Keats House earlier this month.

Tess is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and her current research explores representations of weather and climate in georgic poetry of the long eighteenth century. Her PhD thesis focused on time in three long poems of the long eighteenth century: Milton’s Paradise Lost, Thomson’s The Seasons, and Wordsworth’s The Prelude. We invited her to share her knowledge of Milton and the Romantics and to tell us more about ‘The Romantics Reading Milton’: the title of her public lecture on October 10th. You can find out about future events at Keats House here.

In your talk you explained your interest in how Milton was venerated as both a man and a poet by the Romantics, and how Paradise Lost gained even more respect as the long eighteenth century wore on. Can you summarise – for those who missed it – your theory about Milton as a figure that united the Romantics in their admiration of him?

It’s important not to generalise too much about the Romantics as if they’re a homogeneous group, but it’s also useful to identify trends across periods and movements. Something we see happening in the late eighteenth century is a general reevaluation of Milton as a man. As a poet he was widely venerated throughout the eighteenth century, but the details of his life – particularly his republican politics, his involvement with Cromwell’s administration, and his continued commitment to the ‘Good Old Cause’ even after the Restoration – were held at bay by eighteenth-century critics like Samuel Johnson. This is something that does shift in the Romantic period; it becomes impossible simply to dismiss Milton’s republicanism, when it so clearly invites comparison with French republicanism and growing republican movements in Britain. William Hayley’s Life of Milton (1796) sets the tone for this. Arguing against Johnson’s criticisms, Hayley praises Milton’s constancy: ‘his principles […] will be condemned and approved, according to the prevalence of opposite and irreconcilable opinions, that fluctuate in the world; but his upright consistency of conduct deserves applause from all honest and candid men of every persuasion’. Admiring Milton’s constancy becomes a prevalent feature of Romantic writing about Milton, even by those writers who don’t sympathise with his republicanism.

I’m interested in how this increased focus on Milton’s biography is in tension with another Romantic trope, which is to elevate Milton to the status of a poetic deity who somehow transcends history, and returns to life to speak to them in the present (most literally in Blake’s Milton). Critics have acknowledged this tension in the Romantic reception of Milton – for example Lucy Newlyn in the preeminent Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader – but most have concluded, explicitly like Newlyn or implicitly, that the mythic, timeless Milton is the more important idea for the Romantics. I don’t want to disagree with this exactly, but I do think that some of the most interesting Romantic engagements with Milton are when they’re thinking of him as a product of his seventeenth-century moment.

Wordsworth’s ‘London, 1802’, for example, in which he exclaims ‘Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour’, is less about the possibility of the spirit of Milton returning than it is about Wordsworth realising the impossibility of this. Wordsworth comes to the recognition that it’s the way Milton ‘travel[led] on life’s common way’ that allowed him to develop the ‘manners, virtue, freedom, power’ for which he is celebrated. The poem is about the necessity of waiting for time to pass. So thinking about Milton becomes a way for the Romantics to think about history: about the time that separates them from Milton, what has changed in the century or so between them, and how they too are defined by their current age.

The frontispiece to William Blake’s Milton

Was it just the young Romantics (i.e. not Wordsworth in later life) that showed this commitment to Milton?

Certainly as some of the first generation Romantics get older they become more ambivalent about Milton’s republicanism. Wordsworth does gradually lean back towards the depiction of Milton as a vessel channelling an ahistorical ‘pure spirit of celestial light’ in order to write ‘immortal lays’ (‘Latitudinarianism’, Ecclesiastical Sonnets). But Wordsworth can still recall, as late as 1822, the ‘republican austerity’ that first struck him in Milton’s sonnets. In the ‘Dedication’ to Don Juan, Byron compares the Lake Poets’ changing politics unfavourably to Milton’s constancy, but what’s perhaps surprising is that those older Romantics often still invoke and admire Milton’s constancy themselves as a way of critiquing contemporary republicanism. Coleridge, for example, contrasts the ‘grand principle’ of the English republicans with the ‘absence of all principle’ during the French Revolution.

Because they use Milton to think about the shape of history in this way, and about time passing and what changes over time, this naturally manifests itself in the writing of older as well as younger poets. Young poets who are looking forward impatiently to the days when they will be great bards think of Milton as an example, and this reminds them that they have to wait, as Milton waited, for time to pass to allow them to reach maturity. Keats, for example, in his poem on the lock of Milton’s hair, thinks of the time ‘When every childish fashion / Has vanish’d from my rhyme […] But vain is now the burning and the strife’. But we also see older writers using Milton to look back over their lives, wishing that they could know and could have known the outcome of their own literary efforts, but acknowledging that only time will tell their success. So in The Plain Speaker Hazlitt wonders about how Milton himself would have seen Paradise Lost: ‘He could not read it, as we do, with the weight of impression that a hundred years of admiration have added to it […] Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary’.

Henry Fuseli, ‘Milton Dictating to His Daughter’ (1794)

As you were speaking at Keats House, can you tell us how Keats figured in your talk, and how you see the poet’s annotated copy of Paradise Lost as an important artefact in literary history?

Keats’s annotated copy not only gives us an insight into how Keats read Milton, which sheds a wider light on Milton’s status in the Romantic period more generally; the annotations are also worthy of close literary analysis in their own right, as many of them are beautiful and strange.

It was one of Keats’s annotations to Paradise Lost that first got me thinking about how the Romantics use Milton to think about time and history. At the opening of Book IV Milton describes Satan flying to Earth to tempt Adam and Eve, and he exclaims ‘O FOR that warning voice […] that now, / While time was, our first parents had been warn’d / the coming of their secret foe […]’ Next to this Keats writes ‘A friend of mine says this Book has the finest opening of any—the point of time is gigantically critical’. Keats also notes that ‘Nothing can be higher—Nothing so more than delphic’. That phrase ‘more than delphic’ is particularly intriguing – what does it mean to be ‘more than delphic’? Is this a reference to the way Milton as a prophet figure doesn’t so much look forward through time (like the Delphic oracle) as backward through time? Or a reference to the fact that here Milton acknowledges his ultimate inability to access the past, and the impossibility of using future knowledge to change history? Keats is drawn to this moment when Milton is wishing that things would have turned out differently, and in this passage you feel Milton’s frustration that he can’t transcend history and go back to be that ‘warning voice’ himself.

Of all the Romantics Keats is particularly keen to keep Milton in his historical moment. In one of his letters he writes about the ‘grand march of intellect’ that has separated the nineteenth century from the seventeenth and which gives him an edge over Milton: ‘a mighty providence subdues the mightiest Minds to the service of the time being’. It’s easy to see why Keats wants to resist the trope of Milton coming back to life to teach the Romantics; as Keats famously writes, ‘life to him would be death to me’.

Hurry! If you want to see the current exhibition at Keats House, ‘Keats and Milton: Paradise Lost’, you can visit before 30 November. The original volumes of Keats’s annotated copy of Paradise Lost are also on display in John Keats’s Parlour.

Search

Becoming a Member

If you aren't yet a member of the K-SAA, please visit our "Join" page, which offers a number of membership levels from which to choose. By becoming a member of the K-SAA, you also receive a subscription to the Keats-Shelley Journal.